“I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.”
― Gail Honeyman
Which is better, to my mind, than someone saying, "oh, I like all kinds of music."
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For aficionados of The Simpsons: Cypress Hill to finally make ‘The Simpsons’ orchestra joke “a reality”
In the 1996 Simpsons episode Homerpalooza, Homer took his family on a road trip to an alternative rock festival Hullabalooza in a bid to prove to his children, Bart and Lisa, that he was still the cool and in touch with popular culture. However, he soon embarrassed them when he became a sideshow who had cannonballs aimed at his stomach – before proving a hit with bands and festival-goers.
Among the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, Cypress Hill made a cameo in the show, during which they joked about performing with a classical orchestra.
There's even a clip, proving that sooner or later, reality does copy art.
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I've said a few times that the canon, however you define it as the repertoire advocated by academics, by performers or by public taste, is always in constant flux as the influence of each group waxes and wanes. Therefore, I tend to see pronouncements, by academics in particular, as being potentially just attempts to sway the dispute in their favor. Lately there seems to be an attempt to re-evaluate the most famous 20th century artist, Picasso: How good, really, was Pablo Picasso? First of all, trigger warning, is this "good" a suggestion that there are objective standards in aesthetics?
Blue Picasso, pink Picasso, cubist Picasso, society Picasso, surreal Picasso, ceramist Picasso, late Picasso. Picasso in his underwear, Picasso in a bow tie. Harlequin Picasso, bullfight Picasso, the poets’ Picasso, the GIs’ Picasso. Anti-fascist Picasso, communist Picasso, peace dove Picasso. Prankster Picasso, heartsick Picasso, lecherous Picasso.
Yes, Pablo Picasso was all over the place. He died 50 years ago this month at 91, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.
Adam Gopnik wrote a critical essay twenty-five years ago:
One of Gopnik’s most contentious claims was that Picasso’s best work was confined to the “fifteen-year period centered on cubism, the First World War, and its immediate aftermath.” Surrounding this high period, he wrote, “was a vast sea of kitsch, an almost bottomless vulgarity of imagination, an ugliness that was not the honest Medusa’s-head ugliness of modernism but the glaring ugliness of falseness and sentimentality.” “What made cubism great,” he declared, “is not that it gave Picasso a means of self-expression, but that it acted as a barrier to self-expression — pretty much the only one he ever met.”
We might, after Philip Ewell, just say that Picasso was an above-average painter and leave it at that. But one starts to wonder, how soon will we start to ask how good, really, was Igor Stravinsky?
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Headlines and titles so often over-promise: Quartet review: did four women really change the world of classical music?
The subtitle of Quartet, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.
But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers Ethel Smyth (b.1858) Rebecca Clarke (b.1886), Dorothy Howell (b.1898) and Doreen Carwithen (b.1922), however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.
Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.
The reviewer mentions some significant omissions, including my favorite UK woman composer Elizabeth Maconchy.
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The Nation tells us about The End of the Music Business. The article gives a fairly comprehensive history of recorded sound. Favorite quote, the ever-popular one from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” The conclusion:
No one outside of the inner corporate circles really knows how the economics of the streaming world works. It pays, but what does it pay, and to whom? Reasonably high-profile artists in many genres have not been shy about posting their meager Spotify royalty checks to social media. Many of those artists then encourage listeners to buy their music on Bandcamp as a moral choice. That’s when you know the old model is truly dead: “Buy my music as a moral choice.” The music business as we knew it lasted about a century, from 1903 to 2003.
The biggest check I ever got in my career was from my record company for copyright infringement. They settled.
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We need to be grateful to Rick Beato who listens to pop music so we don't have to. In the process of listening to the top ten, he shows what a great ear he has (and how weak the songs are).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD_DoKo5Dg8
Out of the top ten songs in the world, he finds that only three of them are actual, you know, songs. He and I agree on Miley Cyrus: she is a good singer and "Flowers" is an actual song. But wow, most of this stuff isn't even bad, it's just ... nothing.
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Reviewing a couple of books on lives well lived, Psyche comes to sound rather Aristotelian: A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived
The good human life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means. Mere living might be possible under the solitary law of instrumentality; living well, however, is not. ‘The freedom from small utilities and large ones,’ Hitz observes, ‘from colourless surroundings, from the human diminishment offered in given social roles – this freedom grounds a vast variety of human possibilities.’ The Homo faber hypothesis of the early modern anthropologists and the US pragmatists was always an insufficient account of the human being: chimpanzees and orangutans use tools and weapons; ants and termites build elaborate supercities. No ape or insect, however, has been observed writing poems, philosophising or singing the blues.
Much as I appreciate Taruskin's long battle to restore music's social context, it is good to hear, now and then, about some individuals' lonely pursuit of something out of the ordinary.
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An article on modernism and politics: Modernists can be monarchists. The subhead summarizes it nicely: There’s an assumption that atonalists must be anarchists, but musical radicals often have conservative politics.
To Craft — and you can almost see him shaking his bespectacled, all-American head — Stravinsky’s enduring respect for Russian royalty was literally beyond belief.Great modernists aren’t supposed to think like that, are they? They’re meant to be radicals, revolutionaries — and in fairness, few composers have worked more diligently to present themselves in that light than Stravinsky, or found a more willing enabler than Craft. Meanwhile a profoundly conservative spirit was hiding in plain sight. I still remember my surprise when I first read that Stravinsky dedicated his Symphony in C — that brisk, brilliant deconstruction of art and emotion — “to the glory of God”. Craft witnessed him lying prostrated before the altar of a Los Angeles Russian Orthodox church for a full hour on the morning of his 68th birthday. The great musical iconoclast actually carried an ikon of Saint Gerasimus with him wherever he travelled.
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For our first envoi, the Symphony in C by Stravinsky:
Next the Suffolk Suite by Dorothy Carwithen:
And while we are in a mellow mode, here is some Brahms played by Grigory Sokolov:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8QPgQHsag
Unrelated, but I've just read Liona Boyd's autobiography -- do you know it? It's certainly not up there with Berlioz (that other guitarist-memoirist), but it is gossipy and scandalous and at times a modern picaresque -- and therefore rather good fun. Particularly as so much of it is in Canada, you may enjoy comparing it to your own career. (I don't suppose your paths ever crossed?) Her early years playing in freezing cold rural Canadian churches sound especially tough-going, with no payment except a cup of tea. It often seemed that her spectacular success had less to do with music and more to do with amorous relations with powerful men -- Alexandre Lagoya and Pierre Trudeau most notably. Her seven-year affair with Trudeau is an astonishing thing I never knew. And actually, although she treats it all with surprising good-humour, it is horrible all the lecherousness and harassment she endured by those in a position to advance her career (not from Trudeau, but many, many others).
ReplyDeleteIn comparison with your experience, John Duarte was quite unkind to her in their one meeting:
"Don't tell me you're planning to be the next Segovia? Unless you started at age six and can run through all the repertoire by age fourteen, you haven’t the foggiest chance of giving concerts! It’s too bloody competitive, and girls seldom stick with it. Face the facts and become a teacher.”
In fairness to her, she doesn't speak ill of others or seek to settle scores. I don't think her playing is particularly fine, especially given the fame she achieved, but I came away quite liking her.
There are some remarkable stories in there -- sometimes just as casual asides. Like the time was invited, by the judge, to play for the jurors in the OJ Simpsons trial! Or how Prince Philip piloted her to England in his private jet, and then invited her to perform for both prince and queen at Windsor Castle, and stay as a guest of the family, including breakfasting with them.
And there was one great big historical near-miss. Andrew Lloyd Webber met her and wanted to write music for the guitar. But she lost his number and it never happened. Phew. Goodness knows how that would have affected classical guitar programming...
No, I didn't know that Liona had written an autobiography! I'm rather surprised that she is telling tales, as when she was active, this was all behind the scenes gossip. Other tales: she used to say that she studied with Segovia but once when he was in Canada, a journalist asked him at the airport about it and he said that he had never met her. I was chatting with an orchestral musician who had played a concerto with her once and he said that she was just an awful concerto player and unmusical. I ran into her once in the foyer of a concert hall, but we didn't have much to say to one another. I have to admire that she was able to do as well as she did given the Canadian concert scene--or lack of! But I never had much of an opinion of her as a musician.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that Duarte was so hard on her, but he had a few rough edges. He once gave me a very significant look and said about John Williams: "you know, he is one-quarter Chinese!" as if it were some sort of racial stain.
She called me on the phone a few years ago asking my help in arranging a concert with our local chamber music series, but I had to tell her that we had just engaged Pepe Romero for a pair of concerts.
I was in Lethbridge once, a small city on the Canadian prairies, and she was playing a concert downtown the same night that I was playing at the university.
She sure had the social thing down...
Interesting! Hm, I did wonder if she was making any of it up. Sometimes there's a hint of mischief in the prose that made me suspicious, but I'm a believing sort... Not that I hold it against her. On the contrary, I think a good autobiography should have a liberal amount of fiction and embellishment. She is a good storyteller, and I imagine rather charming company and an able social navigator.
ReplyDeleteShe does mention some of her bad performances, including as it happens a concerto for which she was totally unprepared. But other times her lyrical and Romantic description of her own performances are difficult to square with the recordings that exist.
"Difficult to square with" is such a delightfully English way of praising with faint damns!
ReplyDeleteOh, one more story: I was attending one of the big Toronto guitar festivals back in the day and she played one of the noon concerts wearing a gorgeous floor-length grey silk dress. As I was leaving I ran into an American guitarist I had become friends with. He just gave me a look and said "nice dress." As a critique of the performance, it was spot on. Honestly, I remember the dress, but I can't remember a single piece she played...
Heh, the strange thing is that, at various points in the book, she refers to her 'unique' or 'original' repertoire. But if you think what she was playing then was uninspiring, you should watch her latest videos.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I heard some of her "original" stuff a few years ago: generic derivative with ethnic herbs and spices.
ReplyDeleteI finished Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms and L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions, both of which are very fun books! Discussed them briefly here.
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/04/how-sonata-forms-and-journeys-through.html
Thanks, Wenatchee, I went right over and read the post.
ReplyDelete